The Amaroc News: The Daily Newspaper of the American Forces in Germany, 1919-1923 (New Horizons in Journalism)

Hell, heaven, or Hoboken by Christmas” vowed Black Jack Pershing when the November armistice silenced the Great War, but in fact American forces occupied the Rhineland from 1918 to 1923: it was to inform and entertain those troops on foreign soil that the Amaroc News was created in 1919. The audience of the Amaroc (American Army of Occupation) News was the American doughboy, the soldier without a war, or, as Howard Rusk Long says in his Foreword, the unhappy aggregate of exiles formed into an army of occupation and forced by discipline into the deadend routine of peacetime soldiering away from home.” Thus Cornebise’s social history focuses on the soldier and the life he lived as reflected in the pages of a paper staffed primarily by military men, by men who knew the interests of the soldier in an occupation army. Cornebise sketches a chronological history of the Amaroc News, then moves quickly to the problems faced by the liveliest military newspaper after World War I. Using as his major source the Amaroc itself, records of the Army Expeditionary Forces (WWI), and other material from the National Archives, Cornebise draws parallels between the lives of the occupation soldiers of 191823 and those soldiers overseas today, especially in Germany. The peacetime doughboy had little desire to be part of an occupying force in Germany. Nobody did. Not the French, not the Belgians, not the British. The Germans decidedly did not want them there. Yet American soldiers at least had the Amaroc News, a highly colorful newspaper that gave them a blend of the concerns of most young American menwomen, sports, jobs, travel, education. But it gave them more: soldiers who read Amaroc came away with an expanded sense of the world’s events and of America’s changing position in the international picture.